‘I’m sorry to have taken up your time,’ I said, holding out my hand.
‘Not at all,’ Zinotis replied. ‘You must pass on my deepest sympathy to Tanya. He was a great companion, he will be missed by many people.’
Despondently, I retraced my route back towards the bridge over the Vilnia. It was mid-morning and the traffic was a little quieter. The Uzupis Café had just opened when I reached it. A young woman was unfolding the glass double doors and securing them with bricks. Inside, the staff were wiping tables and arranging chairs. I ordered a coffee and took it out to the decked area at the back of the café. Glancing down towards the river, I saw the letter immediately, suspended in the tangle of twigs and branches where I had thrown it.
The land sloped steeply from the back of the café to the bank of the river. I slipped down the grass and, holding the wiry trunk of a young birch, hung out over the water to retrieve the ball of paper. It was damp. Delicately I eased it from its resting place without ripping it.
As I clambered back up to the café platform, I noticed the waiter leaning against the door jamb watching me.
‘Just doing my bit to keep the city tidy,’ I said, taking my place back at the table where I had left my coffee.
He raised his eyebrows and turned back inside.
With care I straightened out the envelope, smoothing it gently with the palm of my hand. Untucking the flap, I pulled out the single sheet inside the envelope. The letter was relatively dry. Kolya’s spidery handwriting ran down the page, a little faded but quite visible. My heart was pumping hard, I noticed, and my fingers trembled as I held down the corners of the page while I read.
Vassily,
Forgive me for writing to you when I promised I would leave you alone. You are my last hope, and I don’t believe you will, after all, turn your back on me.
When we spoke a few years ago, things got heated. We both said things that should not have been said. We were all to blame over the bracelet. The years have flown, and yet it seems only yesterday we were in that shit-hole of a country. Not a day goes by when I do not think about it, nor a night in which those years and what happened don’t revisit me and terrify me once more.
But now I am in desperate need of your help, my old comrade. I am ill. I have returned to Vilnius to get treatment at the clinic, but it is expensive. I need money. I need my share from the bracelet◦– after all, I have suffered too.
On the back of the letter, when I turned it over, I found some scribbled instructions in Vassily’s hand.
Chapter 11
At the end of our first week in Kabul, junior officers flew in from around the country to take their pick of the new recruits. A tanned, wiry officer with blue eyes that seemed barely able to open in the startling sunshine chose a small group of us to replace the dembels from his platoon stationed near Jalalabad, east of Kabul, towards the border with Pakistan. Kolya and Vassily were posted with me. A small helicopter was waiting at the airport to transport us across the mountains. We were each issued a parachute as we climbed into the belly of the chopper. The helicopter was already piled high with goods. A dembel held out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Have a smoke,’ he said with a laugh. ‘It’s going to be your last.’
As the helicopter rose into the clear sky, we watched Kabul drop away behind us. Every few minutes flares whistled out from the sides of the helicopter.
‘The muj have got better equipment than we have,’ the blue-eyed officer said. ‘They’ve got Stinger missiles. The CIA are funding the insurgents, channelling arms through from Pakistan.’
Deep mountain fissures ran between Kabul and Jalalabad. The rocks erupted from the earth as sharp as knives, baking in the intense heat. Gorges dropped away, hundreds of metres deep, so that they seemed like narrow channels into the very heart of the earth.
The sides of the mountains were clothed with ragged skirts of thorny bushes. Occasionally, in valleys, on the banks of bubbling torrents, there were willows and poplars and mulberry trees. On the plains, beside pockmarked roads, lay ruined villages, their dry mud bricks crumbling back into the ground they were raised from.
I gazed down at the passing scenery in wonder. Camels slumped sullenly beside a dusty track. On a plain by the river lean goats flocked around a large vaulted black tent and small children shouted and danced, arms flapping as we passed. Villages rose from the parched earth with narrow streets running between high-walled compounds. From the outside these family enclosures, with only small wooden doors opening out on to the world, looked barren and dusty, but inside were pleasant courtyards with flowers and vegetable patches shaded by large trees. All this was roofed by the sky, a tautly stretched cerulean awning, punctured by the towering peaks of the mountains.
As we flew east towards Jalalabad the day grew warmer, the vegetation more lush and the air heavier. Jalalabad was a large town, green and hot and lively. We were overwhelmed by the sudden sweet scent of ripe fruit, the startling blaze of colour and the frenzy of noise◦– donkeys, cars, parrots, stalls, monkeys, turbaned men, the blare of Hindi film classics; the dust rising in choking clouds, cars rattling and jolting along streets that were barely passable.
Our base was twenty kilometres out of Jalalabad, but the road was so poor it took almost an hour to get there. Around the base on every side rose mountains capped with snow, which glittered dazzlingly in the sun. A river ran close to the base, sucking noisily at the pebbles and rocks as it passed. Beyond the river grew a small wood of poplar and willow, skirting the lower slopes of the rising foothills. Two walls of fencing topped by barbed wire encircled the base, ten metres apart. Between them the ground was mined. The base was rudimentary; the officers had constructed basic huts for themselves but the rest of the soldiers still lived in large tents that billowed in the breeze.
Our first task was to construct huts for the granddads, who spent most of the day lounging in their tents, nursing bottles of vodka and smoking. Hardly a single granddad was dressed in uniform; they slopped around in vests and sports trousers with slippers on their feet. To build the huts we dug holes in the earth and filled them with clay and water. We worked the clay all day and then put it into ammunition boxes and left it to set. These rudimentary bricks we bound with wet clay. The huts we built were small and dark. At first we fitted glass into the windows, but at the end of the first week there was an attack and the exploding rockets shattered the windows, so we made do with polythene.
A granddad took us in the KamaZ with an accompanying APC to a deserted village a few kilometres down the road to get wood for the roofs.
‘When we first set up camp here,’ the granddad explained, ‘we got fired on from this village. One of our soldiers got hit in the stomach. We rounded up all the men and interrogated them, but how the fuck were we going to find out who it was? There were fifty of them. Some were little kids and then there were the grizzled old granddaddies with their long white beards and their big fucking turbans. We took one of the men, an ugly fucking git, and shot him to teach them a lesson. The next thing we know the whole fucking village has uprooted and headed off for the mountains.’
The village was at the top of a slight incline surrounded by irrigated fields. The road ran at the foot of the rise, a track leading from it, winding into the centre of the village. The high walls had begun to crumble. Between each of the compounds ran narrow, rutted lanes. We let in a couple of dogs to check there were no mines or booby-traps. In the centre of each courtyard was a well, and around it several complexes of rooms, with beaten-earth floors and sun-dried brick . walls painted with lively patterns.